


Mine Honour Lives

by Gileonnen



Category: Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: Cousins in Love, Graphic Rotting, Hunting as Pastime and Euphemism, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Coital Touching, Present-Day AU, Procedural Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-20
Updated: 2013-02-20
Packaged: 2017-11-29 22:03:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/691986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aumerle is unwilling to accept the official story on Richard's death, and unwilling to move on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mine Honour Lives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angevin2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angevin2/gifts).



Edward was the first to find his body, long before the tracking dogs located so much as a sniff of him. He didn't begrudge the dogs their poor success; they'd had all of England to canvass, and he'd had only a few square kilometers.

Northumberland had been surprising forthcoming, with a gun cocked at his brow.

By the time he found the man, flies and birds and foxes had been at his body, and violets were sprouting between his rotted fingers. Were it not for the heavy rings on his left hand, Edward would have never recognized him; if he had died of foul play, even Edward could no longer tell. He would leave that to the forensics specialists and the professional detectives. It was no longer a task for a sportsman to perform.

He knelt by the body of King Richard the Second, and he prayed.

* * *

"I see your game now," Richard laughed, twisting his hand a little in Edward's hair. "Asking me on a hunting trip after you've exhausted me, how _could_ you--"

"I'd been meaning to ask you for days, but the time never seemed right," said Edward roughly. He curled closer under the soft sheets, fingertips pressing at Richard's ribs and a laugh smothered at his shoulder. " _Will_ you come? I know you're not exactly mad about hunting …"

"But you are, and I do want to please you, even though you're nothing but a beastly strategist. We really must play chess, if you're going to be cunning." With a light touch, he suggested that Edward should turn onto his back, the better to have his neck kissed. "Very well, Ned," he whispered against Edward's jaw. "Set a date, and we'll hunt like proud lords of old. Hounds baying, foxes flushed from their dens, horses foaming at the lips, shouts of joy echoing over the hillsides as the guns frighten partridges from their nests ... et cetera."

"You needn't make it sound …" But Edward didn't know exactly how Richard was making it sound, and so he only swept a heavy hand down Richard's back and let the matter drop. "If you say you'll go, I know better than to try to change your mind again. You'll be bound and determined to be charmed by it."

"I am determined," said Richard. "You mustn't cross me, Aumerle; caprice is in my blood."

"Like haemophilia."

"Very like." They settled closely together, chuckling and whispering endearments, trading touches and kisses until Richard drifted to sleep.

He was beautiful, thought Edward--classically beautiful, all soft hair, lean frame and fine lips and excellent bone structure. He was a subject for art and music, a cultural icon more than a political figure; there were glam revivalists who affected his style, their hair dyed and combed just so. There were slow, minor-key rock ballads about the doomed love of Richard and Robert de Vere.

Wasn't exactly unusual, that no one wrote love songs for fat, bluff Edward of Aumerle. Art loved the queer nexus of excess and asceticism that Richard and Robert could inhabit; it was interested in the kind of bone-deep longing that could never be satisfied by having. It had little to say about contentment.

 _Like proud lords of old, shouts of joy echoing over the hillsides_ ... "Et cetera," he muttered, and pressed his lips to Richard's palm.

It wasn't worth losing sleep over.

* * *

The official cause of death was exposure exacerbated by starvation, and there had been no evidence to the contrary when Edward had made his own inquiries. Why Richard had frozen and starved in the ruin of Pontefract Castle, so close to the warm lights of the town, the coroner could offer no good explanation. "Likely he was trying to avoid the authorities," she said. "After he didn't make it to the Tower, why, you remember the manhunt--"

"That I do," said Edward, shortly. He remembered Isabel softly recounting a clandestine meeting on the road, and old Northumberland's terrified eyes when he'd heard the safety click off. "That I do."

"There you are, then," said the coroner. "Now, I'll thank you not to be poking around my place of work again."

He left with a curt _thank you, Ma'am_ , shutting the door rather too hard behind him.

It was a bright, perfect spring day. After yesterday's rain, the sky was perfectly clear, perfectly cloudless; water had gathered in depressions on the pavement, and the brisk wind drew tiny wavelets across the surfaces. In every planter hanging by every shop shingle, fresh flowers spilled forth in innumerable colors.

Richard's signet ring fit poorly on the smallest finger of his right hand.

* * *

Anne liked to take tea with her husband's lovers, when they came to visit; it was her way of at once maintaining her privacy and asserting her claim. Her husband's guests were welcome in her home, and cosseted as especial friends, and made to feel as though they might drop by again at their leisure--but let them never forget that it was her home.

She dressed effortlessly well for their teas, fine white sundresses in summer and tailored jackets in winter, cameo necklaces on ribbons about her throat and her hair bound up and strewn with pearls as though with dewdrops. Today, she wore a pale blue dress that would surely unfurl like a morning glory if she were dancing. "As you know, Richard is out hunting with Robbie," she said, raising her brows significantly as she sipped at her Darjeeling.

"I thought he hated hunting," said Edward, at which she laughed.

"Oh, he despises hunting," she agreed at once; her accent was only faint now, and charming. "But my husband is easily charmed by pretty words, and Robert de Vere has very pretty ... words. Particularly to do with hunting."

"I see," said Edward. He drank his Earl Grey with great care, trying not to grimace at the taste of it. His mother had chided him more than once for his poor etiquette in the fine British art of tea-drinking, but if wanting cream and sugar made him a philistine then he would be a philistine gladly. Before the queen, though--before his lover's wife--he felt an absurd desire to show himself as cultured as she.

She smiled across the table at him. "Madeleine?"

"Who--oh." He took one of the soft little cakes, feeling uncomfortably as though he would finish with crumbs in his beard. "Apologies, Ma'am."

You know," she said, with a thoughtful expression, "I've always found you the most charming of "Richard's friends. There's something remarkably earnest about you, as though you haven't anything to prove but you're desperate to prove it regardless."

"I only want you to think well of me," said Edward, putting the madeleine down before he'd tasted it. "And if you do ... well, my thanks, Your Majesty."

"Call me Anne," she answered. Her small, soft hand closed on his; it was still warm from the teacup. "What is my name?"

"Anne," said Edward. He swallowed. "You--you'll have to call me Ned."

"I think I will, my Earl of Rutland," she said, and he met her eyes. There was mischief in them, as clear as ever was mischief in Richard's eyes. "I think I will."

* * *

When Richard returned from his hunting retreat, only minutes shy of midnight, he only laughed and slid into bed between his wife and his cousin. "If this is the kind of knavery I can expect when I leave," he told them solemnly, "I'll have no choice but to stay."

* * *

It might be his seventh gin and tonic, or his eighth. When the boy down the bar started buying rounds, he lost count; he drank what was put in front of him and rubbed his eyes against the sour, tight feeling in his face.

"Hey, there," said an unfamiliar voice.

"Rather not talk t'you," Edward answered, huddling closer around his drink. "What've I got to say, eh? Just--just failures, mistakes, b-betrayals--"

"Shh, it's all right," said the young man. "Let's get you home."

"Rather not go."

"I'll stop buying you drinks," the boy said--he was the boy down the bar, then, the boy with flash friends and a raw, high laugh and a pair of women at his shoulders.

"Don't need you to buy 'em."

"You do if you haven't got a wallet," said his benefactor, and then he flashed Edward's wallet in his face. Edward reached for it, but the boy drew it away and laughed. "Now, then, let me be a friend to you. My boys and I will take you home. We've carried back loads fatter than you are. Here--let's have your hands."

He was so damned tired. So damned _tired_.

"They killed him--just--just fucking _killed_ him," Edward sobbed, and he didn't care if the boy knew who he meant. "And I was the one found him--didn't even l-look like a man by then--and I could've k- _killed_ the bastards, but I--I--"

"There, now," the boy said gently, taking his hands and pulling him off of his stool. "We'll see you safe home again, won't we? And then you'll be well enough."

Edward let himself be led home, and let the young man and his friends lock up behind him.

The light hurt his eyes. He turned it out.

* * *

"Thanks," said Hal, when the door had shut and the light had gone off. "I'll owe you a favor."

"Don't see why you wanted us to pull an old man out of a bar," said Poins.

"He's my cousin," Hal answered. "Saved my dad's life. Someone has to look out for him."

Poins shoved his hands in his pockets, with a kind of affected nonchalance. "Cousins don't have much of a life expectancy in your family, seems like."

"It wasn't always like that," Hal said. He seemed to pause a moment, looking up at the sky to see if he could make out stars amid the light pollution and the glitter of passenger planes--then he shook himself, and moved on.


End file.
